


Belong to the Sun

by MaddieStilinski



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Happy Ending, M/M, Nature, No Plot/Plotless, POV Adam, Sad with a Happy Ending, this is the hardest fic to tag omg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-09 19:26:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5552324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaddieStilinski/pseuds/MaddieStilinski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knew he’d leave one day. </p>
<p>Today was not that day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Belong to the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> This is possibly the most self-indulgent thing I've ever posted anywhere. It's how I imagine the Raven Cycle series to end. I just had a lot of feelings and they sort of came out in this form and I don't know why but it's here haha. 
> 
> For context: In my head, the gang all live and it's horrible but they survive and they carry on. OKAY cool ^^
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Henrietta looked a lot smaller the further away you got. The houses were closer together and the centre of town was tighter knit and the outskirts were nearer than Adam had thought them to be. He’d seen it from the air, but it was the space in between that showed the true heart of the town. It was a spiralling mess, a complex pattern of rich and poor and open and crowded, and it wasn’t his. It should have been his; he was born here, raised here, _made_ here. He should know it like he knows the scars on his hands.

It shouldn’t feel like a lie when he calls it home.

Adam felt a hand squeeze his own and was only vaguely surprised to remember he’d been holding Ronan’s hand.

‘Alright?’ Ronan asked him.

Adam nodded, squeezed his hand back. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Just thinking.’

‘Dangerous stuff, Adam,’ Noah said.

Ronan laughed, but it didn’t sound right.

‘I’m serious,’ Adam said. He couldn’t get the wrongness of Ronan’s laugh out of his head. ‘I’m fine.’

‘We’re not fine, Adam. None of us are.’ Blue wasn’t looking at any of them. Her eyes were cast over the horizon, her head resting on Gansey’s shoulder. This was the first time Adam had seen her walls properly crack. Everyone’s had, really, but somehow it was worse seeing it happen to Blue. Even though it was unfair of him to do so, Adam had always assumed Blue was unshakable, an island in the middle of a treacherous sea. But now he was seeing the truth and it was ugly and disheartening and unfair. Blue was not unshakable, just as Adam was not unknowable - she had never been that way. She was just as human as the rest of them, and maybe it was her family, or the way she made everything louder, but Adam always seemed to forget that.

‘We’re alive,’ he replied, leaning a little towards Ronan. ‘Doesn’t that count for something?’

 

They stood for a while on their little hill, not talking, just being. Blue and Gansey held each other like they were scared the ground would swallow one of them whole. Ronan ran his thumb repeatedly across Adam’s knuckles, and, when he got tired of that, along Adam’s wrist. Adam kept holding his hand. Noah stared at something none of the others could see.

Eventually, Gansey sighed. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that Adam’s right.’

After the silence, the statement sounded more profound that it should have. None of them answered straight away. Adam simply turned his head slightly so he could see Gansey clearly. He looked nothing like the Gansey he’d known yesterday. He was smaller, just a little hollower in the eyes. Younger, maybe? Not less, more a suggestion that there was once more.

Maybe that’s what dying does to a person.

‘What am I right about?’ Adam asked.

‘About being alive,’ Gansey replied. ‘It does count for something.’

Adam didn’t know if it was the fact that Gansey had actually died, or that he came back from the dead, or a mixture of the two, but Adam believed him.

‘What does that mean for us?’ Blue asked.

‘It just means we’ll have to find something new to think about,’ Noah said.

Ronan clicked his tongue. ‘Got any suggestions, ghost boy?’

Noah glared at him at the same time as Blue said, ‘Don’t be offensive.’

Ronan smirked. He rubbed a circle on the back of Adam’s hand, but didn’t look at him. That was how this was going to work, him and Ronan. It was going to be subtle touches and snide comments and hammering heartbeats. It was going to be like that because Ronan didn’t have the capacity to be vulnerable. His mask only faltered on dark nights in Adam’s room, when the air was too heavy to be held up, and the only way to breathe was to spill secrets into the atmosphere. The only times Adam had seen the real Ronan was when they were together with the world wrapped inside their sheets, the magician and the dreamer and their own imagined reality. Adam didn’t know if he preferred this Ronan or the one he knew lurked just out of sight. He supposed that one without the other wouldn’t work. He tried to imagine it, but he couldn’t separate the two. They were the same as much as they were different. Maybe the Ronan that came out at night, the softer Ronan, stayed hidden so it didn’t have to endure. Maybe they were all soft underneath it all.

 

From behind a cloud, the sun appeared, bright and brilliant and magnificent. Ronan brought up a hand to shield his eyes, and Noah smiled, but Gansey looked away. Adam found it strange, although there was a lot about Gansey he found strange. He was wearing an unreadable expression, his brows brought together, almost like he was thinking, searching for something. But his chin was tilted in the direction of the light and his mouth was soft, and all at once it was obvious to Adam what that expression was. It was wanting. It was not knowing. It was pain and relief and uncertainty. It was knowing that you’re home in a place everyone else is ready to leave.

‘I wish we could stay here forever,’ Gansey said suddenly. ‘Would that be possible?’

‘We’d get bored,’ Ronan replied. He let go of Adam’s hand and brought it round his waist instead.

Blue sighed and Gansey pulled her closer. ‘Only boring people get bored, Ronan.’

‘Speak for yourself, Sargent. I’m a delight.’ Ronan took his hand off Adam just long enough to poke Noah in the ribs. ‘Tell her I’m a delight.’

‘You’re a delight,’ Noah droned, but it was obvious he meant it.

 

‘We could just sit here a while?’ Adam suggested, looking around at the others. They all looked back, contemplation written in the raise of an eyebrow, the bite of a lip.

Gansey, with his dirt smudged face, was the first to nod. ‘Sure.’

‘I like that idea,’ Blue said. She folded herself down, drawing her boot-clad feet under her before tugging Gansey down beside her. He laid down and rested his head in her lap. Blue made about dragging her fingers through his hair.

Noah joined them next, leaning to knock shoulders with Blue. He looked happy. After everything, Noah looked happy.

‘You gonna join us, Parrish?’ Ronan said this from the ground.

Adam, unaware that he was the last standing, sat too, knees drawn up to his chest. Ronan tangled their feet together until Adam had no choice but to accommodate him.

A bird started singing somewhere above them. It didn’t sound exactly happy, but it didn’t sound sad either. It was the sort of song that sounded like memories, the kind that stayed with you even after it finished.

Adam took a minute to take it all in; the fields, the sun, Henrietta. He knew he’d have to leave eventually. He didn’t belong here. But right now, he belonged to the sun, to Gansey and Blue and Noah and Ronan. He belonged to this moment. He knew he’d leave one day.

Today was not that day.


End file.
